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LANCASTER, PA -- The Franklin & Marshall College men's basketball team remained among the elite of Division III as a select group of sports information directors, journalists and Division III head coaches at D3Hoops.com ranked the Diplomats 24th in the February 27th edition of the site's national poll. F&M (22-5, 12-3 Centennial Conference) went 1-1 last week in the Centennial Conference Playoffs as the Diplomats defeated Ursinus (70-56 W) in the semifinals, but fell to Gettysburg 50-47 in the Conference title game to snap a 15-game winning streak at home in the Mayser Center. The Diplomats will advance to the post-season for the first time since their 2000 NCAA Final Four run as F&M accepted a bid to the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) Championship Tournament. It marks the first time in the history of the sport at the College that the men's basketball team will participate in the ECAC tournament as the Diplomats narrowly missed a NCAA Championship berth on Sunday night. The Diplomats will have the opportunity to start a new home victory streak, as the Diplomats will host the semi-finals and finals of the tournament in the Mayser Center. To date, F&M is 15-1 in 2001-02 at Mayser, the best home record in the Centennial Conference this year. In preliminary action on Wednesday, #3 College Misericordia (18-9) and two-time national scoring champion Willie Chandler hosts #6 DeSales University (16-9) in Wilkes Barre, while #5 Penn State-Behrend (18-8) visits #4 Lebanon Valley College (17-8). Both games are slated for 7:00 p.m. start times. F&M and Kings (21-6), the #2 seed, receive first round byes and will host the semi-final games in Lancaster on March 2. The winners of those games will then travel to a common site - F&M's Mayser Center - for the semi-final and championship rounds to be held on March 2 and 3. On Saturday, the winner of the Misericordia-DeSales game plays Kings at 5 p.m. Beginning at 7:00 p.m., Franklin & Marshall will host the winner of the LVC-PSU game with the championship game set for 3:00 p.m. on Sunday, March 3 in Mayser. The D3Hoops.com Top 25 is voted on by a panel of 25 coaches, sports information directors and writers from across the country, and is published weekly. Previous Top 25 results are available at http://www.d3hoops.com/top25. D3Hoops.com is widely considered the preeminent source of information on Division III basketball in the electronic medium. D3hoops rankings have appeared in Sports Illustrated, ESPN Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Hartford Courant and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, among other publications.
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